Behavioural comparison of some predictive tools used in a low-energy building

Today, many building software tools for evaluating energy efficiency are available. More than three hundred are listed by the US Department of Energy. Despite the diversity of the tools and their users, they generally share the same goals: to reduce the consumption of energy and even to produce surplus energy. We were interested in comparing the information provided by five softwares programmes that are widely used in France: EnergyPlus, TrnSys, CoDyBa, Pleiades + Comfie and PHPP. We used these programmes to predict the energy performance of an experimental low-energy building, currently under construction at Le Bourget-du-Lac. This building is the first one on the experimental platform of the French National Institute of Solar Energy.